In the fast-paced world of modern product development, user experience and design is critical to help your product stand out.
Building product with great design is challenging though — it requires close collaboration between design and engineering, dedicated engineers, and buy-in from the whole team.
This is where design systems come into play.
What is a Design System?
A design system is a comprehensive collection of guidelines, principles, and reusable components that ensure consistency and efficiency in product design and development.
Design Systems come in all different shapes and forms and will look different from company to company. What's important is that you find what works for you.
At its heart, a design system provides a unified language for designers and developers to communicate effectively. It encompasses things like
- Typography
- Color Palettes
- Iconography
- UI Components
- Forms
- Layout Patterns
By having a centralized repository of design elements, teams can effortlessly create and maintain a consistent user experience throughout their products.
Why use a Design System?
A design system provides a unified language for designers and developers to communicate effectively.
Designers and engineers aren't reinventing basic components and layouts every time. Instead, designers can focus on building intuitive user experience while engineers can focus on implementing core business logic.
Design Systems have been proven to increase efficiency across the board:
- 15% accelerated feature speed-to-market
- 50% improvement in designer and developer efficiency
- 2x faster project delivery
When do I need a design system?
Whether you're a solo developer or on a team of hundreds of engineers and designers, a design system can be beneficial.
For solo developers, components and colors are a great place to start and are a must for starting any new project. In fact, starting with the basics and building it out as you go is ideal.
Design Systems are living creatures. They should be constantly evolving and improving depending on your team's needs.
For teams with designers and engineers, depending on the size and complexity, documentation and guidelines become more important and establishing best practices can streamline product development.
How do I get started?
Design systems can be hard, especially if you're starting from scratch. Luckily, there are a lot of great examples out there.
Here are some of our favorite design systems:
Even with these great examples, we at Magic Patterns understand it's still intimidating to craft components.
That's why we're building our product — an AI platform that makes it easy to design and build UI.
If you're interested in using Magic Patterns with your own custom design system, we're happy to chat to see how we can help, or just pass our experience on. Schedule some time here!
It's better starting a design system sooner than later. You'll thank yourself down the line!